The Hierarchy of Fat Loss - Part I

“Yes, let’s run the marathon!! It’ll be a great way to lose weight!!” Noooooooooo, don’t do it!! Not before you read our hierarchy of fat loss! We’re not saying don’t run the marathon, hell we’re going to support friends this weekend at London – we’re just saying don’t do it to lose weight! There are quicker ways honies, let us break it down for ya’ll:

This is working every muscle hard, frequently and with intensity, resulting in a huge post exercise afterburn leaving the metabolism elevated for several hours post-workout. A 2002 study in the European Journal of Applied Physiology, showed that a circuit training protocol of 12 sets in 30 minutes induced an afterburn for thirty eight hours! This means that if you worked out at 7am on Monday morning, you are still burning calories at 9pm on Tuesday!

The killer cardio that just keeps giving! High intensity interval training (HIIT) is defined as something so intense that you couldn’t keep it up for more than 60 seconds. And so it requires you to do it in short intervals with recovery in between to be able to complete the session. It burns more calories than steady state cardio and elevates the metabolism significantly more than other forms of cardio. A 1994 study by Tremblay compared 20 weeks of endurance training against 15 weeks of interval training. The energy expended by the endurance training group was 28,661 calories, and the energy expended by the interval training group was 13,614 calories (less than half). And yet, the interval training group showed a nine times greater loss in subcutaneous fat than the endurance group, despite more energy expenditure whilst actually exercising. Again, we can say thank you to an elevated afterburn! HIIT anyone? It also stops us from obsessing about how many calories cardio machines are telling us we’re burning.